While waiting for HBO favorites, sink your fangs into new shows

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — I’ve got bad news and good news for San Antonio viewers longing for an HBO fix.

You’re going to have to wait a while for the return of popular shows such as “Big Love” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The polygamy series’ third season won’t premiere until the first quarter of next year. And because Larry David is busy with a new Woody Allen film, his HBO comedy won’t come back for a seventh season until even later -end of 2009.

However, you don’t have a long wait ahead for “Entourage’s” fifth season. It premieres Sept. 7.

Moreover, several fab new HBO offerings will debut in the next couple of months.

At the top of the list, is an edgy, funny and weirdly sensual drama series of the adult kind from the creator of “Six Feet Under,” Alan Ball.

Instead of focusing on the business of death, Ball’s new series focuses on the undead: vampires. Based on the popular Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris and set in the Louisiana backwoods, the series’ 12-episode first season debuts at 8 p.m. Sept. 7.

But don’t expect your usual vampire here. These modern creatures of the night are very different.

For one thing, they’ve come out of the coffin, so to speak. Thanks to the invention of synthetic blood (True Blood), vampires need not rely on humans for their fix.

So, they can move about fairly freely now and are even interviewed on TV shows such as Bill Maher’s. However, they are still treated as unsavory outcasts.

HBO courtesy photo

Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer from True Blood

Could they be viewed as a metaphor for gays in America right now? “I really don’t look at the vampires as a metaphor for gays in a very specific way,” Ball told critics at an HBO “True Blood” session.

“Part of the joy of this whole series is that it’s about vampires, so we don’t have to be that serious about it.

“However, they totally work as a metaphor for gays,” Ball added, “for people of color, in previous

times in America, for anybody who is misunderstood and feared and hated for being different.”

Ball isn’t what you’d call a vampire fanatic, however. He wasn’t into TV’s “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” or the Anne Rice novels. “This was really my first foray into the world of vampires,” he said.

Moreover, the mythology of this particular vampire tale is different in several ways. “In our world, a lot of the myths about vampires were created by vampires themselves over history so that they could pass,” Ball said. “If you could convince everybody that, you know, you couldn’t be seen in a mirror or that you would freak out if somebody shoved a crucifix in your face, then you could prove you weren’t a vampire pretty easily.”

Here, the vampires’ fangs also are cooler; they retract like rattlesnake fangs when vampires want them hidden and when they want them revealed, they click forward.

Best of all, there’s an unconventional love story at the heart of this series. The heroine, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) works as a waitress at the popular bar, Melotte’s. Though human, she does have unusual qualities of her own; Sookie can read minds, a talent which complicates her life in so many ways.

Complicating it even further is her brush with the bar’s first vampire patron -173-year-old Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer).

However, the two feel an immediate attraction upon meeting, and develop a relationship that spawns all kinds of problems and dangers.

“Having a vampire as a boyfriend isn’t always the simplest of things to choose,” said Paquin at the same HBO session.

The series also has its darker -and trashier -side, delivering graphic sexual scenes, violent beatings, even a murder.

As I said, this is an adult series and not for kids.

Other HBO treats ahead?

*A seven-part miniseries from the producers behind “The Wire,” called “Generation Kill,” which follows an elite Marine unit into Iraq during the first weeks of the war. (Read about its debut Sunday in my Jakle column.)

*A standup special, starring Ricky Gervais of “The Office (the original Brit version and “Extras”) debuting in November.